Staff Profiles

Advanced Output Center

Mike Dorries is a Chicago based artist who has been with SAIC since 2008. Mike joined the team at the Advanced Output Center as a full-time technician. His background in computer animation and design was leveraged at the AOC to broaden the scope technologies the AOC has been able to offer students. In 2011 Mike moved into the manager position for the AOC, where he continued to research and develop new avenues of delivering educational materials to students, staff, and faculty. Under Mike’s lead, the AOC developed and deployed a digital certification course for laser cutting and 3d scanning technologies, opening up a world of digital fabrication to more students than ever. In his spare time outside of work, Mike leverages the technologies offered at the AOC to design, fabricate, and modify toys. With his design practice, Mike focuses on blending digital output with traditional analog techniques. In one example, Mike has shown students how 3d printing can be used for printing a high resolution version of a digital model that is ultimately made into casted copies by incorporating mold making practices. In another blended technology project, Mike took a 3D scan of his spouse, CNC milled out a mold positive. That CNC mill was cast into a plastic resin and painted up to look like the original scan data. 

Dan Giroux graduated from SAIC with a BFA in 2016. After graduating, Dan joined CRIT full time, working as a technician for the Advanced Output Center. At the AOC Dan helps students and faculty execute projects using the laser cutters, 3d printers and 3d scanners the AOC has available for use. Dan also is responsible, with manager Mike Dorries, for the maintenance and operation of those devices.

While Dan's work as a student at SAIC did involve some of the 3d processes that he assists with at the AOC, he mostly focused on Video and 2d work in his time at SAIC. Most of Dan's work involves generative data sets and automated processes, often using single board computers and simple programs to create work that changes over the iterations it repeats. The two compound images are projects that were variously drawn, engraved or sewn using automated patterns. The video stills are various video processes during some step in their creation, some displayed as videos and some as interactive installations.

Dan also is very active in the Chicago Soccer community, playing and organizing rec soccer in Logan Sq. as well as serving as Chairman for Section 8 Chicago, a non-for-profit organization representing supporters of the Chicago Fire Soccer Club. Through these groups Dan helps organize fundraisers and donations for various soccer-related and non-soccer-related charities in the Chicago-land area.

Sullivan Fabrication Studio

Kazuki Guzmán is the founder and creative director of Studio Zuzu, a Chicago based design studio that creates domestic objects and furniture. Studio Zuzu’s current work focuses on traditional Japanese crafts as a methodology for an appreciation of handmade culture and sustainable design. The studio aims to expand the accessibility and vocabulary of traditional crafts and create new possibilities of collaboration among makers of all fields.

Upon graduating in 2011 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture, Guzmán traveled on a boat to 26 different countries engaging in art and social practice with a non-governmental organization. This experience, alongside his love for crafts informs his current research and design practice. Guzmán has lectured internationally and his work has been published and exhibited worldwide; including the Taiwan Design Museum, Houston Center for Contemporary Crafts, and Designboom.

Luis Rodríguez Rosario is an Instructional Fabrication Supervisor at the Sullivan Fabrication Studio. Rodriguez is a Puerto Rican artist residing in Chicago with an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Image and Design from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño of Puerto Rico. He has participated in several exhibitions within Puerto Rico and the United States of America; such as the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture, Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, La Productora and the Museo Antiguo Arsenal de La Marina Española. 

He presented his first solo exhibition titled “A fuerza de pulmón” in Área: Lugar de Proyectos as part of his residency with the Proyecto Graderío. Rodríguez works present forms that constitute a dispute over the visibility or invisibility imposed in our environment; for instance, those caused by the effect of globalization and cross-cultural interaction.  He draws upon the imagery of Tropicalismo/Tropicale’o to reference and accentuate the absurdity of the colonial gaze that continues to dominate the cultural motifs of the Caribbean.

Alessandra Norman is a desert lizard that finds herself living in and enjoying Chicago. Norman is a graduate alumna of SAIC (Printmedia 2019). Previous to her time in Chicago, Norman has lived in New York, Alabama, and Texas. Her previous arts-related experience includes time at the Roger Brown Study Collection, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (NYC), Newark Printshop (NJ), and co-founding Gesamtkunst Werkshop, a curatorial project she shares with her partner. Past professional experience includes over eight years working in the world of print and package design.

An interdisciplinary artist, Norman is interested in observing how humans view the world — seeing as both a method of but also metaphor for comprehension, and perceiving the frameworks through which we see. Along with an active studio practice, Alessandra also co-runs the cactus practice Astro Ranch together with her partner, and makes lamps in her spare time.